Monday, January 25, 2016

The
destruction of the mining industry was a deliberately worked out plan.

It was an
attempt to take on and smash the most militant determined and class conscious
section of the organised labour movement. And this was seen as a critically
important task by the ruling class and their chosen instrument, the Tory Party.

It even
had a name, the Ridley Report, named after its author.

Ironically
Nicholas Ridley MP, like David Cameron, was another well-heeled rich boy who was
educated at Eton College along with the other rich boys of his generation.

The
Tories had been thrown out of office in 1974, during the big upturn in strike
action which is best remembered for its miners’ strikes, with power cuts and
the three day week. Ted Heath went to the polls asking the question: “who runs
the country” and lost!

The ‘70s
were a period where wave after wave of industrial struggle forced the
bourgeoisie to look to more extreme measures than ‘usual’, while at the same
time the working class, the unions and the Labour Party began to move towards
the left.

Many
workers began to draw revolutionary conclusions on the basis of their
experience, while extreme Conservative politicans began to plot a military coup
to overthrow that well known revolutionary, Labour Prime Minister Harold
Wilson.

In 1974
the Tories drew up a plan as to how they might take on and defeat a major trade
union in the public sector or nationalised industries as they were known at the
time!

It was a
blatant policy designed to declare civil war against the working class. The
plan was quite thorough, as became obvious when it was leaked to the Economist
in 1978:

·
The government should, if possible, choose who and when to fight;

·
The plan grouped industries together based on an assessment of how easy they might be to beat;

·
Coal stocks were to be built up at the power stations;

·
Coal supplies should be arranged via non union foreign ports

·
Non union lorry drivers should be recruited;

·
Coal/oil dual fuel generators should be built at whatever cost;

·
The state must "cut off the money supply to the strikers and make the
union finance them";

·
It was necessary to organise and equip a squad of mobile police, ready to use
special riot tactics to defeat pickets.

Ridley
was merely the architect of the plan but it’s quite clear he wasn’t acting
alone. The plan was agreed by the Selsdon Group of right wing Tory MPs, a group
that included among its number both Norman Tebbitt and Margaret Thatcher who was
elected Tory leader in 1975.

Margaret
Thatcher was eventually elected Prime Minister in 1979, by which time the right
wing Labour government was utterly discredited and the leadership isolated
within the active layers of the labour movement.

Society
was polarised, the Tories began to implement an economic strategy designed to
make the economy ‘leaner and fitter’. In other words they sought to make the
working class pay for the economic crisis that erupted between 1979 and1981.

The
Tories responded by slashing benefits to the old and the sick, cutting services
and attempting to roll back the welfare state, under the banner of “self
reliance”, “choice” and “the free market”.

The
Ridley Plan was central to this programme, the straightforward reason being that
the organised Labour and trade union movement represented the biggest single
obstacle to their plans. 10 million workers were organised in the TUC,
potentially the most powerful force in British society, and the working class
was moving to the left.

The
Tories had to risk a confrontation with the unions. The ruling class had no
option, under conditions of capitalist crisis. In the minds of Thatcher and her
cronies there was ‘no alternative’.

It would
be wrong however to look at the Ridley Plan in isolation. It was just one
aspect of the Tories anti trade union onslaught. Even today, after almost 12
years of New Labour, the laws governing trade union activity in Britain remain
the most repressive in any of the advanced capitalist countries. Restrictions
on picketing, the huge bureaucratic process required to carry through strike
ballots and the right of the government to “sequester” trade union assets were
all imposed to try and cut across the potential for militant trade union
struggle, which had been so much a feature of the 1970s.

The
ferocity of the struggle that the miners were forced to wage to defend their
jobs and communities however, revealed the limits of the Ridley plan and the
trade union laws.

Despite the plans that the Tory government had prepared and
despite all of the legal mechanisms and ploys that they used to undermine the
strike, the battle of pit closures lasted for almost a year. The level of
support within the working class for the miners meant that millions of pounds
were raised on the streets and from the labour movement to support the miners
and their families. The Tories were forced to move the legal goal posts on
several occasions to try and shackle the National Union of Mineworkers.

The class
struggle is a battle of living forces, involving real men and women. The
strategy and tactics of the ruling class are an extremely important factor in
the situation, but of even more importance is the role of the leadership of the
working class.

The
Ridley Plan was just part of a drift under Thatcher towards authoritarian rule
in Britain, authoritarian rule now considered necessary by the ruling class.
This was carried out through parliamentary means, a form of ‘parliamentary
bonapartism.’ as the Marxists explained at the time.

This
reflected the crisis of capitalism and the fact that the ruling class weren’t
confident that they could rule through the ‘usual’ methods. Yet the strategy of
the Labour Leaders was to adapt to the new conditions by appearing to be
“reasonable and moderate”. Meanwhile the trade union leaders adopted a policy
of ‘new realism’, essentially weakness and collaboration. Under these
conditions the outcome was inevitable - more attacks on the working class and
the poor, the weak and the old. At the same time however the ideas of Marxism
began to gain ground and began to become a significant factor in British
politics.

The main
lesson of the Ridley Plan for the labour movement and the politically active
layers of the youth is that a Tory government would be forced to move against
the working class, to deal with the crisis that the capitalist system clearly
faces. In the dark corridors, and the city boardrooms similar plans will be
being drawn up today. Our task has to be explain the threat that this poses and
help arm the movement to fight and defeat the Tories.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

I have repeatedly warned that the cost of failing to
interdict the obscene amount of money
laundering that goes through the City of London, will have huge consequences
for ordinary people.

When any society fails to obstruct the flow of criminal
money, the people who are moving the money become the de facto controllers of
the banking system.

It is pointless hoping that our children will be able to
stay in London in the future.

Even if there were any jobs for them, they will not be
able to afford the rents of even the smallest flat, never mind have any
aspiration to own a house of their own.

Property prices have escalated way beyond the hopes and
ambitions of ordinary men and women, and London has quickly become the stamping
ground for an army of foreign criminals, tax evaders, pimps, whores and
assorted slimeballs, all of whom have found London to be a very welcoming home of
choice.

We have sold our once-proud sense of independence and our
strong degree of self-reliance to a bunch of Russian and Asian crooks whose
money will not pass muster, but as no-one in the British financial Establishment
is looking too closely, City practitioners have merely become highly paid prostitutes,
working in the financial bordello of EC3.

This
dependency on Russian money is even distorting our foreign policy position. England’s
political establishment has become crude and mercenary. A British civil servant
was recently pictured arriving in Downing Street for a national security
council meeting with an open document in his hand, dealing with a proposed UK
response to the crisis in Crimea and the Ukraine. Despite the Russian
aggression, it recommended that Britain should “not support, for now, any trade
sanctions,” nor should it “close London’s financial centre to Russians.”

Mustn’t
let principles get in the way of enriching the City of London.

The Government agrees, it doesn’t care as long as the
money continues to flood in. Never mind the fact that we have strong laws
designed to prevent and forestall the entree of this money, the laws and the
regulations are widely ignored by George Osborne, Boris Johnson and David
Cameron, in order to permit this cornucopia of foreign dirty money to seep into
every nook and cranny of the financial establishment.

A recent article in the New York Times points out that
the UK is deliberately breaking step with the Americans over this issue, and
puts the matter this way.

“...The
White House has imposed visa restrictions on some Russian officials, and
President Obama has issued an executive order enabling further sanctions. But
Britain has already undermined any unified action by putting profit first.

It boils
down to this: Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City
of London’s hold on dirty Russian money. And forget about Ukraine.

Britain,
open for business, no longer has a “mission. Britain’s ruling class has decayed
to the point where its first priority is protecting its cut of Russian money —
even as Russian armoured personnel carriers rumble around the streets of Sevastopol.
But the UK establishment understands that, in the 21st century, what matters
are banks, not tanks...”

The
Russians also understand this. They know, as many UK criminal investigators
know, London is a centre of Russian corruption, that their loot enriches
Britain’s empire of tax havens — from Gibraltar to Jersey, from the Cayman
Islands to the British Virgin Islands — a financial empire on which the sun
never sets.

You can
now buy British residency, our much vaunted citizenship is up for sale. And it’s
cheap for a Russian oligarch or crook.

“Investor
visas” can be purchased, starting at £1 million ($1.6 million). London lawyers
in the Commercial Court now get 60% of their work from Russian and Eastern
European clients.

More than 50 Russian-based companies swell the trade at
London’s Stock Exchange. Planning regulations have been scrapped, and along the
Thames, up go spires of steel and glass for the hedge-funding class.

Britain’s
bright young professionals have now become the foreigners’ poodles, the
oligarchs’ valets.

Vladimir
V. Putin, understands the rules of the new game only too well. When you pay the
piper, you own him, and you call the tune. Putin was absolutely certain that Britain’s
managers — shuttling through the revolving door between cabinet posts and
financial boards — would never give up their fees and commissions from the
oligarchs’ billions. He was right. Never underestimate the British taste for
foreign funny money.

The direct impact is that property prices, already
inflated by the free availability of this money are enjoying a knock-on effect
elsewhere in London, as professional workers, accountants, lawyers, bankers et
al spread wider and wider to afford houses, while the prices of ordinary 3
bedroom Victorian terrace houses, of which London possesses hundreds of thousands,
spread across the Metropolis, spiral upwards exponentially.

Billions
of pounds of corruptly gained money has been laundered by criminals and foreign
officials buying upmarket London properties through anonymous offshore front
companies – making the City of London the world capital of money laundering.

Transparency
International, the respected anti-corruption organisation, reports that some
36,342 properties in London have been bought through hidden companies in
offshore havens and vast numbers are thought to have been bought anonymously to
hide stolen money. The flow of corrupt cash has driven up average prices with a
“widespread ripple effect down the property price chain and beyond London”,
according to property experts cited in the most comprehensive study ever
carried out into the long-suspected money laundering route through central
London real estate. by Transparency International.

Some
sources claim it has skewed developers towards building high-priced flats and
houses rather than ones ordinary people can afford. While corruption and tax
evasion are likely to be the biggest sources of the illicit money, drug
dealing, people trafficking and sanctions busting are also common, police say.-

TI’s
research, which includes previously unreleased internal figures from the
Metropolitan Police Proceeds of Corruption Unit, found that 75 per cent of
properties owned by people under criminal investigation for corruption are held
through secret offshore companies.

London
has become a global magnet for corrupt funds, TI said, due to the high prices
of property – enabling millions of pounds to be laundered at a time – and
Britain’s notoriously lax rules on the disclosure of property ownership. Any
anonymous company in a secret location, such as the British Virgin Islands, can
buy and sell houses in the UK with no disclosure of who the actual purchaser
is. Meanwhile, TI said, estate agents only have to carry out
anti-money-laundering checks on the person selling the property, leaving the
buyers bringing their money into the country facing little, if any scrutiny.

Anti-corruption
experts have repeatedly expressed frustration that the UK does so little to
stem the flow of money stolen from their countries. This author has repeatedly
warned against the impact of permitting foreign-based criminal capital to be
laundered through London.

Robert
Barrington, executive director of TI, said: “This has a devastating effect on
the countries from which the money has been stolen and it’s hard to see how
welcoming the world’s corrupt elite is beneficial to communities in the UK.”

If
you have any illusions of watching your grandchildren grow up in London, forget
them, your children won’t be able to afford the housing.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

We are beginning to witness the first moves in a debate
within the Labour Party which engages with the suitability of renewing our
policy of maintaining nuclear weapons through the Trident programme.

Now that the Cold War is over and Russia herself is involved
in far greater degrees of asymmetric warfare, as indeed are we, the need for us
to maintain large numbers of nuclear weapons has frankly disappeared.

The original justification for their existence was as
part of a Cold War philosophy of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ or MAD for
short. The idea being that an attack by one weapons’ owning state on another
would trigger a retaliatory attack before the first bombs arrived, so that both
countries would ultimately be very badly damaged if not effectively destroyed.

However, there is no
justification to undertake a first strike against an enemy, any enemy, and there
is no debate on this, and it is abhorrent to suggest that there ever could be.
So the question remains, under what legal justification could Britain possibly
use its deterrent?

Second strike capability is
frankly a nonsense, as in these days, just a small percentage of the weaponry
possessed by other nuclear powers, would be sufficient, if used first, to return
the entire United Kingdom to a smoking, throbbing radioactive rubble. So all
this talk about sealed letters aboard nuclear submarines signed by the Prime
Minister is all a little academic.

Moreover, Britain is
committed under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to move toward
disarmament. By deciding to renew its deterrent, it may undermine the very
treaty that it is so keen to hold Iran to account over. Why should it listen to
another country that is saying nuclear weapons are dangerous and unnecessary
when it refuses to disarm itself?

Finally, I would like to pose
a question as to which nuclear power would the one most likely to bomb Western
Europe pre-emptively?

When I was a uniformed police
recruit undergoing my basic training at Hendon, we were lectured in the last
few weeks of basic training, by two men from the Ministry of Defence, who
advised us of our likely role as police officers in the event of a nuclear war.

It was all so surrealistic
that I doubt if any of us took the scenario planning very seriously. I for one,
considered that the likelihood of my surviving the nuclear winter they
anticipated would be unleashed, was so small as to be beyond consideration.

However, the one thing I do
recall with absolute clarity was their determination of the identity of the
country dropping the first nuclear weapon to impact on the UK, and that was
America.I can still recall my shock
at learning this likelihood, but they justified its use against us thus!

America had always been
looking for ways of countering Russian aggression and strategic desires. The
way their scenario played was that in the event of a nuclear posturing reaching
such proportions that the likelihood was that weapons of Mass Destruction were
about to be unleashed by the Russians, the Americans would first destroy
Western Europe as a means of providing themselves with a nuclear infected
barrier zone between themselves and the Soviets.

They argued that the Russians
would first seek to gain a toe-hold in Western Europe so as to be able to face
down America, and thus the first strike would be to deny the Russians such an
opportunity, hence the bombs that would obliterate Western Europe, would be
American.

Any readers who have seen the
film or read the book ‘Dr Strangelove’ will have no difficulty in appreciating
this scenario. That is also why British submarines are armed with US weaponry
which cannot be used except with US authority, because we are nearer Russia
than they are.

So, when you hear promoters
of Trident talking about the need to have a weapon which can be used as a second
strike capability against some country determined to annihilate us, remember
they are talking about our retaliating against America!

The UK does not need to
replace Trident. It is vastly expensive, and the days are long gone when we
need to worry about our need to sit at the top table in diplomacy. Britain is
not that important any more, and membership of the nuclear club no longer
carries the threat it once did.

It is time we all grew up,
aligned ourselves with our NATO and EU allies and put the money saved to better
uses.

Saturday, January 09, 2016

Yet again, we are facing the usual tsunami of
disinformation coming from Government, the Treasury and the FCA as to whose
decision was it to decide to drop the review of banking culture.

George Osborne says it wasn’t him, The Treasury denies
having any part in this decision, and Tracey McDermott, fearless acting head of
the FCA says that it was the FCA that made the decision, but it doesn’t mean
they are going soft on the banks.

The
City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, is "not going soft on the
banks", its interim chief executive Tracey McDermott has said.

In December the FCA said it
had shelved plans for an inquiry into the culture, pay and behaviour of staff
in banking.

Such a review was crucial to
a better understanding of why banks have come to resemble organised mafia crime
families in recent years. We, the tax payers deserve the right to know why our
money has been used to prop up an entirely rotten banking edifice, and empire
of crime and wrong-doing, and we are entitled to know how this dysfunctional
system has developed and evolved.

Critics of the decision to
back off say the Treasury successfully put pressure on the FCA to be more
"light touch" with financial firms.

Hang on, we’ve been there
before, haven’t we? Wasn’t it ‘wee Gordie Broon’ who prevailed upon the
regulators to adopt light touch regulation, prior to the banking collapse in
2008.

Look what happened then. The bankers went on a spree of criminal activity
that left the banking industry on the verge of collapse, and we, the tax payers
had to have our pockets picked, to keep these gangsters afloat!

But Ms McDermott insisted the
FCA was still taking tough action, including a £72m fine imposed on Barclays in
December.

Speaking to the BBC she said:
"We're not going soft on the banks, we're not being told what to do by the
government. We have objectives which are set for us by parliament and statute,
and we are determined to deliver on those."

Fining Barclays millions of
pounds for financial wrong-doing is pointless is not being tough on them. It
merely becomes a deduction from their bottom line for tax purposes, it isn’t
punishing them at all. The only people taking the hit are the shareholders,
while the gang bosses on the 5th floor are laughing all the way to
their next bonus.

Frankly, we would be better off in this country without
Barclays Bank, and I suspect, other major banks as well.

Who says so, well I am indebted to Richard Murphy,
a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described in the
Guardian as an “anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert”. He is Professor
of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London.

Quoting from his seminal work

“...Barclays: the bank that just loves Luxembourg and Jersey, but not
the UK...”

I have drawn on some of the
following features, and particularly the way in which Barclays reports its
profitability in the UK. Reviewing Barclays own reported figures provides us
with some fascinating insights.

In examining Barclays own
reported figures for 2014, he states:

What I
wanted to see is whether or not it was likely that the claimed allocation of
profits and losses by Barclays accords in any way with the likely allocation of
profits by Barclays to the UK, in particular...

Suddenly
the UK does not make the loss, which Barclays admit they report in this
country. Instead a profit of almost £1.1 billion is reported. And Luxembourg
does not make a profit of £1.38 billion as is claimed in the original data, but
ends up with just £71 million. Jersey also drops, in that case from £801
million of profit to £53 million.

It is
complete nonsense for Barclays to claim they make a loss in the UK of
significant amount (as seems likely) when in practice more than equal and
opposite sums turn up, virtually untaxed, in Luxembourg and Jersey within their
own accounts.

So, what
is happening? I have a long list.

First,
Barclays is, very politely laughing out loud at the UK and is failing to pay
its way as a UK bank. So much for the contribution the City makes: this bank is
not making it.

Providing
employment? Barclays is employing people who would otherwise be employed
elsewhere.

As for
the banking levy, that’s a tiny contribution to the cost of having effectively
been bailed out by the UK taxpayer in 2008 – which all banks were as it was the
system as a whole that failed. So let’s ignore claim that Barclays is
contributing to the UK in these ways: it is not doing anything more than it
should.

Barclays
is a massive user and maybe abuser of tax havens, and especially Jersey and
Luxembourg.

It is
clear that transfer pricing of head office operations is not taking place
effectively in the case of this company. HMRC must have the power to say that a
company must reallocate costs to the group it manages from the UK or a mockery
is made of our tax system. The need for reform in this area is obvious.

The
question has to be asked as to why we are so keen to have companies headquarter
in the UK when it is very clear that many other countries benefit more than us
by not having Barclays’ head office in their domain. Barclays could bank here
by all means, but candidly we would be better off without their head office.

We can
ask in that case how the Barclays’s auditors (PWC) signed off these accounts as
true and fair when that is the last thing they look to be.

This
analysis suggests that Barclays is massively under-declaring profit in the UK
at cost to all of us. The loss to the UK could easily exceed £150 million based
on the above data. And in that case it is time for serious tax reform in this
country.

Now, a
fair and proper review of banking culture, and particularly with regard to the
way they account for their profit and loss positions, would, I suggest, have
had a seminal impact upon the attitude of ordinary British tax-payers, who
would have rightly become very angry indeed at this wholesale exercise in tax
fiddling.

If
Barclays have been doing it, you may rest assured that the other big players
will have been doing it in order to take advantage of the hyper-relaxed
attitude that Government takes towards the criminal banks in the UK, and it is
legitimate to ask what do these banks really contribute towards the common
weal?

Back in
the day, when the British public had seen the results and the findings of the
Treasury Select Committee, and were asking genuine questions of concern about
the probity and the legitimacy of our banking sector, the Government announced
its intention to undertake a banking culture review. What follows restates its
terms of reference.

“...The
government is today announcing further steps to raise standards of conduct in
the financial system with a joint review by the Treasury, the Bank of England
and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) into the way wholesale financial
markets operate. Strong and successful financial services that set the highest
standards are an essential part of building a resilient economy.

The ‘Fair and Effective Markets Review’ will be led by Bank of England Deputy
Governor for Markets and Banking, Minouche Shafik, with Martin Wheatley (Chief
Executive Officer, FCA) and Charles Roxburgh (Director General, Financial
Services, HM Treasury) as co-chairs.

Recent events have demonstrated the need for authorities and market
participants to take action to ensure fair and effective markets.
Forward-looking in nature, this Review reflects the government’s long term
economic plan to ensure Britain remains a world leader in financial services,
with successful institutions operating to the highest standards.

Drawing on the insights of public officials, market participants, end users of
wholesale financial services, the Review is also intended to reinforce
confidence in the fairness and effectiveness of UK wholesale financial market
activity, and influence the international debate on trading practices.

Amidst recent serious allegations of misconduct in financial markets, the
Review will focus on those wholesale markets where the bulk of concerns about
misconduct have arisen - fixed income, currency and commodity markets -
although it could have applicability across a wider range of wholesale markets.

It builds upon the tough action Britain has already taken to punish the
wrongdoers and fix the financial system, including the work of the FCA to
reform LIBOR and the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards which has
led to a new legal regime for senior managers.

The Review will run for 12 months and is expected to make recommendations on:

principles to govern the
operation of fair and effective financial markets;

reforms to ensure standards
of behaviour are in accordance with those principles;

tools to strengthen the
oversight of market conduct;

whether the regulatory
perimeter for wholesale financial markets should be extended, and to what
extent international action is required; and

additional reforms in
relation to benchmarks, in order to strengthen market infrastructure.

So there
you have it.

During
this cultural review, the question of profit taxation would inevitably have
arisen, and as we can now see, thanks to the insights of a highly qualified
accountant, they would not have passed muster.

No wonder
the bankers didn’t want any element of their banking culture to be examined or investigated.

The taxation
system however was only one small element of the rest of the long list of
criminal actions, dishonest incentives; commissions which possess all the
criminal qualities of bribes; dishonest actions by banking groups setting up
clients to borrow vast sums of money and then deliberately bankrupting them and
taking over their valuable assets; the institutionalised degree of false
accounting in accounting standards; to say nothing of the vast level of
criminal money laundering which these British banks are providing to their
criminal foreign clients.

Any
culture review would simply not have been able to deflect the realisation of
what a bunch of criminal operators have been allowed to take over the control
of the British wholesale banking industry, and such a recognition would, I am
convinced, have predicated a scandal of such proportions that I truly believe
it would have become an issue of political confidence.

I have no
doubt whatsoever that the big players in the banks prevailed upon the Treasury
and therefore George Osborne to soft-pedal on this culture review, realising
that it was a road to perdition.

Well, the
genie may be back in the bottle for the time being, but I wonder how long the
FCA can keep it there. These things have a tendency to explode at just the
wrong time!

About Me

Having spent my career dealing with financial crime, both as a Met detective and as a legal consultant, I now spend my time working with financial institutions advising them on the best way to provide compliance with the plethora of conflicting regulations and laws designed to prevent and forestall money laundering - whatever that might be! This blog aims to provide a venue for discussion on these and aligned issues, because most of these subjects are so surrounded by disinformation and downright intellectual dishonesty, an alternative mouthpiece is predicated. Please share your views with what is published here from time to time!